The Healing (35 page)

chapter forty-three

Mike's battle with double pneumonia left him weaker, yet he emerged from his ordeal like a man reborn. A strange inner peace seemed to have taken root somewhere deep in his being while he lay in the limbo between life and death, and he was filled with a sense of wonder at how everyone rallied around him in his hospital room for the following four days. Vinny and Lisa were there. His other friends—some of whom he hadn't seen in over a year—were there. Lori was there. His mother and sister were there. He allowed himself to be fed, washed, and tended in a new realm of human contact, even when the antibiotics and ingestion of solid food forced him to move his bowels in a diaper.

The nurses fell in love with him despite all that. Somehow the shame of it had diminished. Somehow he was able to find a more reconciled part of himself, buried so long in the rubble of his anger and debility, and he started believing that maybe . . . just maybe . . . Michael Francis Donnelly still had a life to live.

It was Karen alone who had pulled him from the wreckage of total despair. She looked at him like she used to, fed him with intimacy, and talked to him like they still had an indissoluble partnership. It gave every hour of his sedentary existence a new breath of life.

When Monday morning rolled around, Karen arrived in a whirl of activity, eager to bring Mike home. Her greatest wish was being granted, and it put a flush in her cheeks. It was the same flush that had reddened her cheeks when he had first kissed her. It was the same flush he had seen glowing under her veil when she had walked up the aisle on their wedding day. She appeared genuinely happy and maybe even a little nervous.

She had come to the hospital by herself, clearly demonstrating that she wanted to share the triumphant moment as a couple. Just the two of them.

Mike was ready and waiting in khaki pants and a blue polo shirt, and two male aides were summoned to lift him into a wheelchair. After the nurses made it a point to kiss him good-bye and wish him well, telling him he had the nicest blue eyes they had ever seen, a hospital volunteer wheeled him to the main hospital entrance. Then Karen took over. She looked a little bit like a kid entrusted with a cherished responsibility as she settled Mike into their van and popped an Allman Brothers CD into the stereo.

Her choice of background music didn't slip his notice. The Allman Brothers had been a favorite rock band of Mike's ever since they had started dating. “Okay to go?” Karen asked, looking over her shoulder before pulling out.

“Yeah, I'm good,” he replied.

She put the van in gear and started driving. Mike watched her keenly from behind her, still trying to come to terms with her new enthusiasm. He drank in the sight of her carelessly clipped-up hair and found it more glamorous than a salon-styled coiffure. His gaze traced the curved lines of her long neck and slender arms, the graceful hands that gripped the steering wheel, the lean, shapely legs poking out from an old pair of white tennis shorts . . .

. . . Tennis shorts she didn't get to wear on the court anymore.

Mike remembered how well she played. She was a great athlete, agile and strong, and she had beaten him more often than he cared to admit. Her innate modesty and easygoing nature disappeared when she had a racket in her hand, especially when they were playing in doubles tournaments, and Mike cherished the memory of her bouncing back and forth on the balls of her feet with her eyes aglow and her body taut and glistening.

Karen caught sight of him in the rearview mirror. “Penny for your thoughts,” she said.

His grin was almost sad. “I don't fess up for less than a dollar,” he replied.

“Deal.”

“I was thinking about how we used to play tennis,” he said openly.

“How you were always such a sore loser?” she said, her eyes catching his and flickering with humor in the mirror's reflection.

His smile stretched a little more. “I didn't lose
all
the time.”

“That's true. There were the times I was pregnant or under the weather.”

Mike answered with a caustic little laugh, but then he started coughing.

“You okay?” Karen asked.

He nodded.

“Just changing the subject, right?” she added, resuming their playful repartee.

“Go ahead, destroy what little self-esteem I have left,” he said.

“Likely story, after the nurses fell all over you and your dreamy blue eyes.”

“Jealous?”

“Maybe.”

“Good. You owe me a dollar,” he told her.

The drive back to Southold was only the beginning of a very significant journey, and Mike got the distinct feeling Karen had it all mapped out. She was the one in control for the moment, and he was just along for the ride. When she turned off the main road and headed for Founders Landing, he thought she was going to drive by the beach for sentimental reasons. With the music playing, the summer sun beating on the dashboard, and the easy, familiar mood of their conversation, it was already adding up to a euphoric experience. If Karen only acknowledged what the beach meant to them, without even saying a word as they cruised past, it would have been enough.

But she pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine.

“What are you doing?” Mike asked.

Her door swung open, and the warm, salty smell of the beach engulfed them. “What does it look like I'm doing?”

Mike wasn't sure of her motives. He wasn't sure if Karen had stopped for her own therapeutic visit to the beach, which she might have done daily for all he knew, or if she wanted to show him something. He wasn't sure he wanted to see the beach at all. The smell alone evoked something too intangible, too reminiscent of a long-lost life.

“You haven't been here all summer,” Karen said before trotting around to open the rear door.

Baffled, Mike tried to catch her gaze, but she was busy getting the chair unlocked and out of the van. It wasn't his motorized chair, and he immediately worried she would exhaust herself pushing him. “Babe—”

She jumped in to reassure him. “I got it,” she said, obviously determined to bring him with her.

Mike realized that Karen had some purpose, some specific task to accomplish. He just couldn't imagine what it was.

Once he was outside, the direct sunlight blinded him, but Karen didn't have his Yankees cap or a pair of sunglasses on hand. As she wheeled him toward the overlook, he found it easier to simply shut his eyes rather than shade them to try and see a place that he dared not even visit in his mind. Then she stopped, far away from the people on the beach or anyone who might stop and stare, in the shade of the old maples.

His eyes remained closed, and his head was filled with the scent of sand, salt, and seaweed. He still heard the sounds of the surf and the rustling of the leaves overhead. Karen wasn't saying a word. She just let him take it all in for as long as he wanted.

Finally, Mike opened his eyes. He was looking out at the Southold Bay, and Karen was standing beside him. “Why did you bring me here?” he asked in a whisper, afraid to awaken his own memories.

She replied just as quietly, “Because this is a special place.”

Mike felt like he was teetering on the edge of the world, about to lose his footing and slip into the unknown. “It
was
a special place,” he said. “In another life.”

“I used to think so, too,” she admitted. “Until I realized we only get one life.”

Mike looked up at her, his sensitive eyes blinking even in the shaded daylight. She was still so beautiful, and the sight of her standing in the summer breeze, with her eyes reflecting the glory of her surroundings and her lean, golden body poised like a masterpiece, blinded him more than the orb of the sun itself. “And you realized this because I almost died,” he said with biting candor.

Karen reacted as though he had speared her to a tree, and her expression clouded over with pain. Her gaze fluttered away from him—a reflex to hide what she was feeling, to protect Mike from her own misery—but then she forced herself to reconnect. For the first time, Mike saw what he had been longing to see in the depths of her eyes. Laid bare in those reopened windows to her soul was immeasurable anguish born of the deepest love. There was no impatience. No aversion. No resentment. Best of all, there was no indifference.

The veil was finally torn.

Karen crouched down beside his wheelchair. “I didn't come to realize it just because you almost died,” she told him, her voice hushed but full of conviction. “The morning you ended up on the living room floor and cried your heart out, the nurse told me to go out for a walk. I came here to the beach. For the first time in a long time, I let myself remember. I remembered the lifeguard who took my breath away. I remembered how I talked with him, laughed with him, and lived to be with him. I remembered when he first touched me and danced with me. I remembered when he first kissed me.”

Now the tears came, unchecked. But instead of turning away, she let Mike see them. Apparently this was her reason for bringing him to the overlook, where they had shared that first kiss.

“Oh, God—” Karen said, choking on her words. “I cried so hard that day I thought my heart would stop. That was how I met Grace Mitchell. She was walking by, and she saw me sitting here crying like the world was coming to an end. So she invited me to her house for tea. She understood right from the beginning how I was trying to keep up a strong front for you and how I tried to believe that tending to all of your medical needs made me a good wife. She knew why I didn't want you to see what I was really going through.”

Mike felt an intense burning in his own chest that had nothing to do with his recent illness. He hung on Karen's every word, mesmerized by the truths she had kept so well hidden.

She revealed them, one by one. “Do you remember when Lori was lying in that hospital bed after the car accident, and you couldn't stand up after seeing her like that?”

He nodded.

“That's how I felt every time I looked at you,” she confessed. “Every time you had another setback, every time you cried, every time you talked about going into a nursing home or told me to divorce you and find someone else, I wanted to collapse. But how could you know that? I never let you see it. I didn't want to add to your pain. You were already in hell. What you didn't know was I was right there with you.”

Mike felt the tears pooling in his own eyes.

Karen picked up his hand and drew in a shaky breath. She stroked it and kissed it, her adoring lips warm and trembling as they conveyed what was in her heart. “You're the love of my life, Michael Donnelly,” she said, allowing a sob to escape before retaining control of her words. “Nobody in this world can take your place. And after realizing I could lose you sooner than—” Her face contorted because she was now openly crying. “Sooner than I expected, I vowed to take every day we have together as a gift from now on.”

Mike blinked, his own tears rolling in grateful rivers down his cheeks.

Karen smiled and wiped the tears from his face. “Do you think we can do that? For the time we have left, do you think we can just try to look at each day as a gift?”

“We can try,” he agreed, his voice failing him. Without his physical self, Mike knew he had little to look forward to. But with Karen at his side to fill his heart, he might be able to appreciate a blessing or two.

“We have to have hope, Mike. We have to be open to the smallest miracle if there's one meant for us.”

He could only nod. His other hand, trembling worse than ever, lifted off its armrest to touch her face. It seemed so natural that Karen stretched her neck forward so she could press her lips to his. A renewal of their wedding vows, sealed with a kiss.

It seemed like years since Karen had kissed him on the lips. Life surged up inside of him with such force that it left him breathless. She drew back, looked into his eyes, and kissed him again. He managed to brace his hand against the back of her head, his disadvantaged fingers tangling in her hair, as a means to prolong their exchange and kiss her the way he used to . . . the way he yearned to. At first Karen responded with a deep and gratified purr as their tongues danced together, but then she broke down completely.

“Oh, Mike,” she cried, her head bending into his chest. “I miss you so much—”

He cried, too. “Let me hold you.” His quaking arms struggled to wrap around her and hold her as tightly as his soul desired. She had to twist her body at an odd angle to accommodate both the chair and his lack of mobility. But she obviously didn't care. She was going to give him anything he wanted, and they both knew why.

He could wake up tomorrow and never be able to hug her again.

chapter forty-four

Karen sat up in bed. The familiar bedroom where she had slept as a child suddenly felt like it was closing in on her. Even with the breeze gently blowing the curtains, and the fragrance of the night surrounding her, something was oddly out of place. It wasn't that Raymond was sleeping behind the closed door across the hall. He was now Mike's full-time aide, and that was certainly comforting. It wasn't that Lori was back in her own room after three weeks in the hospital, with her animals and her new resolution to stay on the straight and narrow, acting more like a responsible young woman than a troubled, bitter teenager. That was a good thing, too.

It was Mike. Karen should have been sleeping like a baby knowing he was back in the living room. She should have been resting peacefully after baring her soul to him and letting him know they still had a future together. Yet she felt unsettled when she thought of him lying downstairs by himself. The poignant words she'd uttered to him that morning seemed to echo, unfulfilled and empty, without her physical presence to substantiate them.

When they had exchanged their marriage vows, Karen and Mike were truly bound as one, body and soul. They might have been young, but they were highly aware that on that spring day, while standing at the altar in front of their family and friends, they were entering into much more than just a legal union. It wasn't about getting the license at the Queens Borough Hall or the marital status on their tax returns. It wasn't about Karen changing her last name or ensuring the legitimacy of their children. It was about a bond that reached far beyond the concerns of the material world—a giving of their very selves to each other for their preordained completion.

That was why they had chosen to save their ultimate gift for after those vows were professed. It had elevated their physical love to an act of true consummation, sanctifying everything they shared and marking their wedding day as something much more than a major social event. And while all of their married friends had joked about the honeymoon being over before it began, Karen and Mike had entered marital union like kids on Christmas morning. More than two years later, they were still the first to leave a party because they lived for the time they were alone in their apartment together.

Their wedding day had been everything it was supposed to be. Photographs and a few choppy eight-millimeter films captured the things Karen would have forgotten because all of her conscious memories were of Mike. She recalled how he kept looking at her during the ceremony, as if he were entranced by a divine vision and couldn't tear his eyes away. He didn't have to tell her he thought she was beautiful . . . his gaze burned with uninhibited awe. He seemed to hold his breath when they danced, and he clenched her hand close to his heart. She could feel it pounding.

Mike had looked sublime in his black tux, although the bow tie and rented jacket came off soon after they marched into the reception hall. The vest soon followed, and by the time they had fed each other the wedding cake, the crisp white shirt was open to his waist.

They had left their own reception an hour early and headed back to the apartment, which they had been preparing for the previous month, because they didn't want to spend their first night together in a strange bed at a hotel. For the duration of the twenty-minute ride, they had held hands and stolen a few restrained kisses. Karen had begun to tremble when Mike unlocked the apartment door and faced her at the threshold. He had lifted her in his arms, the treasure of his life wrapped in white organza, and carried her inside without a word. Kicking the door closed, he had set her feet on the floor but didn't release her. All of Karen's anxieties were dispelled with one kiss, and by the time Mike had carried her to the bed, the wonders of her body became the perfect complement to the mystery of his. They had lit candles, fully intending to watch one another in the natural beauty of firelight, and found openmouthed ecstasy and total abandon, a unique and private universe that nobody else could penetrate.

Karen couldn't help but wonder why she had closed the door on such a beautiful place.

Throwing her sheet back, she climbed out of bed just after midnight. Clad in nothing more than one of Mike's old FDNY T-shirts, she tiptoed down the stairs into the dim glow of the night-light and ventured over to his bed. But this time she didn't stand there and watch him sleep. She lowered the bed rail, watching to see whether he would wake up and realize what she was doing. He stirred when she pulled the light blanket back, and his eyes opened, glistening and curious, when she positioned one of the spare pillows and settled down on the mattress beside him.

Turning on her side, she faced him in the semidarkness. “Hey.”

Mike didn't utter a word. She could tell he was trying to determine whether or not he was dreaming. So she caressed his face—her fingertips tracing his brow, her knuckles gently coursing along the ridge of his jaw—to let him know she was very real and very eager to be close to him.

He struggled to turn toward her, and she helped him. His right arm, once able to hold her tight enough to suffocate her, simply draped over her and nudged her closer. Karen shifted on the mattress until the lengths of their bodies melded into a warm line. Her bare legs slithered against his to find the comfortable, entwined position they had enjoyed for so many years. Once the physical nearness felt right, Mike touched his trembling fingers to Karen's lips as if making sure once again that they were real before kissing them.

And without the promise of completion, they touched each other more intimately . . . on a shoulder, on a breast, on the throat . . . than they ever had before. The language of their altered lovemaking, expressing the need for something limited but no less profound, may have been different. But the essence of what they exchanged was essentially the same. They heaved soft sighs into one another, became conscious of a catch in breath or an accelerated heartbeat, purred with satisfaction at the sensory awakening of a union that was more enduring than Mike's affliction.

When they fell asleep an hour later, Karen was right where she belonged, with her head resting on her husband's chest and her body snuggled against him. And everything felt right.